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Robert Scoble has posted

October 7, 2004 by Michael Boyle

Robert Scoble has posted

a long, well-written piece about content creation and its place in the current software/internet landscape. His post is in the form of advice for someone who wants to have a talk with Bill Gates, however, which brings up troubling problems.

Isn’t the Microsoft commitment to hard DRM (evidence of which is Ballmer calling iPod users thieves, but that’s not the only evidence) fundamentally incompatible with the idea that Microsoft should be privileging all of these next-gen content creation formats/methods/tools? Content creation doesn’t happen in a walled-off world where “commercial” stuff is completely split from non-commercial stuff. Read Larry Lessig on the subject – he’s had more insight into this than most. For him (in my interpretation), copyright and hard DRM aren’t problems because he’s a communist; rather it’s the reverse. Lessig proposes limits to copyright because he understands how creativity happens, and that imperiling creativity in the name of commercial absolutism is anathema to a society that wishes to derive value (both cultural and economic) from creative pursuits.

Content creation has exploded on the web because of linking, which neatly sidesteps many of the problems with this concept. Since you can link to something on the WWW, you don’t have to worry about copyright issues in order to riff off an idea, to comment about an article, to share your point of view, or to do any of a thousand other wonderful things. But you can’t link, per se, in a recording. You have to sample. You don’t link, as such, in a video – you put up a snippet in a different context.

Maybe it’s the difference between PageMaker/Quark/Indesign that enabled the Zine world and Blogger/Movable Type/etc. in the blogging world. Both kinds of software have enabled loads of “amateur” creativity, in the case of page layout software going back years and years. But there are many more bloggers than zine makers, because since you can’t “link” in print, the barrier has always been much higher to becoming a content creator in that environment, even though the software did make it more accessible than it was previously. Blogging, and writing on the web in general, can funnel all of that creativity and enable a whole lot more as well, since linking allows a different kind of creativity that doesn’t always require as awesome a commitment to creating all content in pretty much of a vacuum. The web lives off the link: the recombination, the re-contextualization, and the re-conceptualization provided by linking are its lifeblood. The constant flow of creativity on the web, which is theoretically and practically unlimited, comes because the link itself brings with it an energy that engages many more people than would be engaged in a non-linking medium.

If other types of content were more freely “linkable” in their own context – whether through sampling or other techniques – then perhaps they could enjoy the same explosion of creativity that harnessed the growth of the WWW. Unfortunately, the “money players” are doing everything they can to stop that from ever happening. And Microsoft is clearly in league with them.

Hard DRM and the kind of explosion in creativity and “content creation” that Scoble is applauding are fundamentally incompatible. All of the wonderful alternative means of expression are possible, but limited as long as you can’t do in those environments what you can do – easily – on the web. I think that for Microsoft to have any place whatsoever in that world of creativity and – beyond providing the basic software like Windows and such – it would have to turn 180° from its current position that non-DRM = theft. And until it does, there’s no point even considering Microsoft as a player among the companies and individuals that are helping all of this amazing creativity grow and flourish.

Tags: Copyfight, DRM, Links, Microsoft, Scoble

Links and relationships

January 14, 2004 by Michael Boyle

Links and relationships

could be explicitly communicated within the links themselves, using a schema called XFN, the XHTML Friends Network. If this sort of thing is really going to work, it’ll have to be pretty ubiquitous – things like Game Neverending and pretty much every website or application through which relationships can develop would ideally support this (or some other) scheme.

Tags: Links, Social Networks

On popularity:

February 11, 2003 by Michael Boyle

On popularity:

Many have been writing about Weblogs and power laws in recent days.

There’s a problem though. The articles all seem to be built on an unsupported assumption: that linking to someone is a reliable and meaningful indicator of the reading habits of the link-from weblog. No such correlation has been shown to exist.

I don’t find any support for this assumption. There are two kinds of links on weblogs: links intrinsic to the text of the site, and links in lists of “favourite sites”. When weblogs first really got going, making a links list on your own site was one of the only ways available to help yourself remember to go to the sites you preferred, so it may once have been an indicator of something. In 2003, however, there are many alternative methods that can be employed to get to the sites one wants to read. I use BlogTracker myself, but there are at least a half-dozen other ways of linking to often-read sites. My own links list (over there on the right) is partially driven by my desire to read certain sites, but links also get there because I’m polite, or because I want to reciprocate for someone who would consider my reciprocation (or lack thereof) significant, or old friends who nevertheless I don’t read often, etc.

Regarding intrinsic links, I think that there are so many different reasons why someone would link to another site – and these motivations change over time – that no causality should be inferred. Overall, though, what I would like to know is this: of heavily-trafficked sites, what proportion of their traffic comes from links from other weblogs? And, if that proportion is low, what do numbers of incoming links have to do with anything?

Tags: Links, Social Networks

As has been widely reported

May 2, 2002 by Michael Boyle

As has been widely reported

, the publishers of DallasNews.com seem to need a smack with the clue-stick. Check out 4B: “If you operate a Web site and wish to link to this Site, you may link only to the home page of the Site and not to any other page or subdomain of us.”

Uh, sorry, but which page I link to on the open internet is my business, not yours. If you don’t want links to your content, don’t put it on the internet. And if you can’t figure out a way to make money off putting material on the open internet, that’s your problem. Deal with it.

Tags: Business, Internet, Links, Opera, Web

Glenn Fleishman

March 14, 2002 by Michael Boyle

Glenn Fleishman

wrote about what he has learned following an episode in which Google removed the links to his site, isbn.nu. No fault of Google’s, just a glitch in the system really, but it had an interesting impact upon Glenn’s business.

Tags: Business, Google, Links

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